Why Is Shakespere So Boring to Read
Welcome to the summer of my discontent: Shakespeare time. Time for Shakespeare by the sea, Shakespeare below the stars, Shakespeare in the park, Shakespeare outdoors, Shakespeare indoors. Shakespeare everywhere.
A brief perusal of upcoming theater indicates that a lot of Shakespeare is either on the boards or will be soon. How much? Don't know. Don't want to depress myself further.
There are few things equally glorious as a swell product of a Shakespeare play, and few things worse than a bad one. Sadly, the bad outnumber the good. Long, boring and incomprehensible, they add nothing to the Shakespearean dialogue. They neither illuminate, nor comment upon, his limitless play with language or his brilliant insight. They experience like they're being produced by people who know they ought to love Shakespeare for people who feel the same.
Long story short? Too much Shakespeare–too much tedious, mediocre Shakespeare–is produced on local stages. If you're non committed to saying something new, different or provocative with your staging, if you're not committed to cutting the windee phuck, and if you lot're not committed to the idea that, at his core, Shakespeare was a showman who wrote plays to entertain, I present these 10 reasons to stay away from Shakespeare:
1) He's been done to death.
There is so much other great theater out at that place. Sure, information technology's non gratuitous to produce. Sure, information technology'due south not as familiar. Just we're going on 500 years of ubiquitous Shakespeare. I don't think papal indulgences, Aztec virgin sacrifices or burning witches at the stake lasted as long. Remember, every time you produce Shakespeare it ways you're preventing your audition from appreciating a dissimilar writer. Recall the master's own words, "I wasted time, and now doth fourth dimension waste me."
ii) Someone else has already thought of it–and probably did it meliorate. Richard III in Nazi Deutschland. Hamlet (or Macbeth) in the Nixon White Business firm. Othello equally an Uncle Tom yep-man killing other dark-skinned people for the white human being and constantly berated past a black-power Iago who spouts Malcolm 10 and Eldridge Cleaver. Conceptualizing, updating and more often than not fucking with Shakespeare is fine. Simply whether your idea takes identify in outer space, the erstwhile W or a rectory, it'south probably already been done. And then why bother? Commit the oldest sins the newest kind of ways.
three) He's wordy.
Shakespeare never heard–or at least never heeded–the adage that less is more. His plays are filled with unnecessary characters, scenes, jokes and rambling speeches. Case in point: the ridiculously convoluted monologue in Henry V,in which a doddering archbishop rambles about the ancient history and geography of France, is some 60 lines long–about twice equally long equally Hamlet's "to be or not to be" monologue. Shakespeare makes David Foster Wallace read like Confucius; if he'd written the begats the Bible would be a 10-book set. It takes a long time to read him, but even longer to sit down through.
"Honorificcabilitudinitatibus."
4) You don't accept the meat.
The greatest Shakespeare plays I've seen locally have either featured fantastic ensemble performances (Marking Rucker's Taming of the Shrewat SCR) or towering individual performances (Ron Campbell in Shakespeare Orange County's Richard III, and the Laguna Playhouse's Othello). For the most part, all the same, inept actors who neither understand nor are able to evangelize the words plague most local productions. Unless you have a bandage, from top to bottom, that is skilled enough to speak the spoken language, don't waste my fucking time. "It is not enough to speak," Shakespeare wrote, "but to speak true."
v) He actually isn't that good.
Information technology'southward non just that everyone knows how his plays will end (Romeo kills himself, Hamlet gets stabbed, Othello chokes the white broad). It'south as well that he stole most of his plots, created so many unnecessary characters, and, if yous have abroad the dick jokes and not-so-veiled homoerotica, really wasn't that funny. And even those who proclaim him an architect of the English language language don't realize that a lot of the phrases he's credited with creating–all that glitters is non golden, it'southward Greek to me–were hackneyed in his day. "Oh, what fools these mortals be."
half dozen) Period sucks. Period.
The worst Shakespeare is the true-blue, the traditional, the kind that tries, desperately, to produce it but as Shakespeare wrote it. This is deadly Shakespeare, the worst kind of bardolatry. It is, invariably, the production of people who love him also much. As Charles Marowitz in one case wrote, "The people who revere him e'er do the worst piece of work. Shakespeare should catch you by the throat."
seven) Defining versions are readily bachelor.
Yes, at that place'south a lot of unwatchable crap on VHS or DVD. Roman Polanski's Macbeth, Mel Gibson every bit Hamlet, and the execrable Romeo and Juliet starring Leonardo De Crappio certainly tin can be missed. Simply Olivier'due south filmed version of Richard III, his triumphant King Lear in a 1984 fabricated-for-TV filming, and Franco Zeffirelli'southward 1968 Romeo and Juliet, which is well-nigh the horniest teenage fuck film ever made, kick ass. Some will fence that Shakespeare needs to be experienced live. That may exist truthful, merely and so does the electric chair. "We have seen the best of our time: machinations, hollowness, treachery and all ruinous disorders follow united states disquietly to our graves."
For details on a crapload of local Shakespeare productions, meet our theater listings in Calendar.
Source: https://www.ocweekly.com/7-reasons-to-hate-shakespeare-6415495/
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